(note this blog was initially written in 2011, we have updated in 2017. It was interesting to see how much has changed as well as how much has stayed the same. We will use *** to indicate paragraphs that have changes.)

The best way to get where you want to be is to focus your efforts in the right direction…

That brings me to the point of this blog – Never develop a new website without first defining the business objectives of the website. You should ask yourself what is the website suppose to do for your business, how is it going to do it, how are you going to measure the success of the site. When you start with these questions in mind you can architect the important functions into your website design.

Planning your website properly allows you to take advantage of the internet marketing tools available today that were not available last year. A lot of websites are stuck in 2001. (update — when we originally wrote this blog in 2011 this was sad, it is even more sad 6 years later as we write the update)

Bake Search Engine Friendliness Into Your Website

We call adding search engine optimization into the architecture, taxonomy and link structure “baking in the SEO”. We can add the SEO into the site after you have built it, but it is easier and cheaper for us to bake it into the architecture during the planning stage. (still as true and poignant as the day we wrote it in 2011.)

To bake in the SEO we simply build/change your site to be user friendly and search engine friendly. From the taxonomy to the link structure everything should be built for easy access to humans and search robots or spiders. The larger your website and the more content or products you have the more important taxonomy and link structure become. Web development, when defined right from the beginning will improve your onsite SEO scores and make your offsite SEO and content marketing more successful.

The link structure should be laid out in such a fashion that your most important content is always a single click from anywhere on the site. This allows your website users quick access to your important content and it allows the search engines quick access to this crucial content as well. As a rule, if something is linked from the home page it is important, if something is linked from multiple pages on the site it is more important. This is one of the most simple rules that is violated.

Build with Smartphones in Mind

Some of our clients see over 50% of their internet traffic come from users on smartphones. It is important that when you develop your website that you do it with the mobile user in mind. If your clientele is heavily weighted towards people under 50 years old you better have a website that understands they are looking at it while waiting to do something else. (i.e. waiting to see a doctor, waiting for the light to turn green, waiting for the kids to get out of school and so on) ***We didn’t change much except the age of the user in this paragraph. Mobile is even bigger % of usage for some clients but we left the 50% because it is still roughly true for most of our SEO clients.

Mobile friendly sites are becoming even more important for business that rely on local customer traffic. Google knows how their customers behave and they now produce a set of search results tailored for mobile phone browsers – your site better fit on the screen, be easy to use and be thumb and finger friendly if you want Google to send you mobile traffic. Even if you take Google out of the equation -and you somehow get a user to your website that is not-mobile friendly you can be sure they won’t be coming back. – We wrote is in 2011, and it is still 100% true. You need a responsive website. Luckily most sites built in WordPress are responsive out of the box.

Usability and Responsive Design

Responsive design has become the industry standard. A responsive websites responds the users screen size and presents content in a way that is appropriate for the screen. Making sure your new website is built with a Responsive Design methodology will go a long ways towards having a user friendly website and it will wonders for you search engine traffic all other things being equal.

An important part of the usability is the speed of the website, especially on mobile devices. Google has a great tool to test the speed of you page. We recommend a score above 75.

If you need help with your new website or if you just need us to look at a proposal from another company to make sure you are not getting taken advantage then you can call us at 972-737-2830. (if you are on your phone you should be able to click the phone number to call us – i.e. mobile friendly.)